The IDE

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MacroHTML has a simple integrated development environment (IDE).


There is a File menu which allows you to:

·	Create a new project

·	Open an existing project

·	Create a new HTML file within the project

·	Create a new template file within the project

·	To remove a file (actually just to mark it so, not really delete it)

·	Open a text editor in which you can manually edit 3rd party files and perhaps the project settings themselves.

The 'Other' menu allows you to

·	Increase the font size of various controls (useful for high-res monitors in early hours)

·	Decrease them

·	Remove the 'Powered by CGISYS' link on generated pages (if you have a valid serial key to do this).

Help menu. There is also context sensitive help (to a degree) for most of the program's areas which you can access by pressing the F1 key whilst in MacroHTML.

Below the menus is a toolbar with several buttons that perform the main operations of the program.

·	The Save button will be greyed out unless you have made a change to one of the source files. Its function is to make sure that the copy of the file that is on disk is exactly that which is being edited, because the compiler compiles the disk versions not the file in memory that is being edited.

·	The Build button 'builds' the disk based version of the currently selected file.

·	The Build All button does that same, but for all files in the project.

·	The View/Run button displays the built file (that is the selected source file's generated counterpart) in your default web browser.

Below the toolbar are the main working areas of the program. On the left is the source file list for the current project:



note that this list is resizeable by dragging the splitter bar in-between the list and the work area to the list's right.

The list contains all the files in your project. Use the pop-up menu that you can access by right-clicking on the source file list:


to

·	Create a new HTML File. MacroHTML will ask you for a new file name with this dialog: Entera name without path - the file will be stored in the same directory qas your project file.

·	Create a new template file. This is a small file that is included into your html with the <<>> wrappers. Thes files allow you to create complicated websites with repeating structures such as manus, headers and footers with great consistency.

·	Delete. This only marks the file as deleted in your project. It does not actually delete the file from disk.

·	Refresh. Reloads the list and the project from disk.

·	Change file path. This is needed when you move a project or files around.

Then there is the 'main work area' which is subdivided into several tabbed pages:

Clich here for details of the main work area.